Two dead in Tasmania as wild winds lash state
Two people have died on a private property in Tasmania’s north-west after a tree fell in wild winds. It comes amid wet weather and severe wind across the state, with gusts reaching 139km/h in the state’s south-west.
Emergency services were called to the scene about 12.10pm, police said.
According to the ABC, the state’s police acting commander, Brenda Orr, said: “It appears that the severe weather has resulted in a tree falling on private property, resulting in the death of those two people. No other people have been injured.
“Both people were on private property, out in the open, when a tree fell.”
Tasmania SES said it had responded to 72 requests for assistance today, with most due to wind-related damage.
Chris Irvine, the Tasmania SES’s acting assistant director of operations and resources, said volunteers had been assisting the community since the early hours of the morning.
Irvine said widespread gusts of up to 110km/h were expected across the state this afternoon, before easing this evening.
Members of the public should take all precautions for their own personal safety and be aware of the potential for falling trees and branches.
The most destructive winds are now isolated to the far north-east of the state and would continue to ease early this afternoon, the SES said.
Key events
Sarah Basford Canales
Australian made more than 240 representations to Iraq before detained citizen was released, Dfat says
The Australian government has made more than 240 representations to Iraq regarding Australia man, Robert Pether, who was detained in a Baghdadi prison for four years until his release in June.
In Senate estimates, Department of Foreign Affairs (Dfat) officials confirmed those representations also included discussions by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong. The official said the most recent was by Wong with her Iraqi counterpart at the UN general assembly last month, following Pether’s release.
While Pether was released from jail months ago, he remains in Iraq due to a travel ban placed on him. Pether’s wife, Desree Pether, said he needed urgent medical care and was unable to receive it in Iraq due to the ban.
The department’s first assistant secretary, Elizabeth McGregor, said Australia continued to advocate for the ban to be lifted.:
We are working tirelessly, tirelessly to secure the lifting of that travel ban that is on him.
Penry Buckley
Former NSW transport bureaucrat admits contractor’s offer to return favour meant ‘nothing else’ but cash benefit
Returning to the Icac hearing on an alleged multimillion-dollar kickback scheme involving NSW transport workers, the commission has seen messages from a contractor thanking former transport bureaucrat Ibrahim Helmy for assisting with an application to be included on a government roadwork suppliers’ panel.
One message sent before the deadline by Adam Spilsted, the operations manager for contractor Direct Traffic, said he hoped the company could “return the favour”.
Asked by counsel assisting Rob Ranken SC what he understood by this, Helmy replied that he was not expecting payment for his initial help with the application. Later, Ranken asked again: “What other benefit did you have in mind if it wasn’t cash?”
Helmy said: “Yeah, I guess there’s nothing else.”
Helmy said an informal agreement was reached several days before the application deadline at a dinner meeting with Spilsted and his wife, Mechelina Van Der Ende-Plakke, a director of Direct Traffic. Helmy was asked about later messages to a female associate in which he wrote: “They [Direct Traffic] still aren’t sure why I’m helping them.”
“I think I didn’t want to tell her what I was doing at the time,” he said.
Spilsted told the inquiry in July that Helmy initially offered to help secure roadwork contracts because he knew his father, although he said he later went behind his “wife’s back” to pay alleged kickbacks to Helmy.
Read our story from yesterday here:
Graham Readfearn
Queensland confirms state-owned coal plants will run for up to a decade longer
The Queensland government has released a new five-year energy roadmap, extending the life of its state-owned coal plants by up to a decade compared to the previous government’s plans.
The state’s treasurer and energy minister, David Janetzki, is speaking to the Queensland media club, saying the plan is “pragmatic and realistic”.
He said the plan was “grounded in realities of consumer needs, infrastructure costs and deliverability time frames”. He said:
That means the journey will be delivered the Queensland way.
Anthony Albanese was asked about the coal extension during his press conference today, before the state government confirmed it.
At the time, he said he wouldn’t comment on “speculation” but pressed: “We know that the cheapest form of new energy is, of course, renewables.”
Penry Buckley
Former transport bureaucrat allegedly sought to help contractor under agreement to ‘return the favour’
The former transport bureaucrat at the centre of an alleged multimillion-dollar kickback scheme is giving evidence before the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) again today.
As we reported yesterday, Ibrahim Helmy has admitted to artificially inflating invoices for one contractor in order to share the difference with them. Helmy was allegedly paid with envelopes of cash, some at an Oporto fast-food restaurant in western Sydney.
Today, the commission has heard evidence of how he allegedly sought to help another contractor, Direct Traffic, secure a potentially lucrative position on a panel of confirmed roadwork suppliers for the Department for Transport in September 2018.
That allegedly includes sharing confidential documents with them close to the deadline to assist with their last-minute application, as well as offering to change their format to make it editable.
The hearing has again focused on the informal language used in messages between Helmy and an alleged co-conspirator in the transport department, Peter Le. “Hey sexy boy,” Helmy messaged Le on the day before the deadline. “Sorry to do this to u [sic] … But can u send these plans in word not pdf.”
“I better be getting paaaaid for this,” Le wrote back. Helmy told the commission Le’s reference to getting paid was “just a joke”. “I hadn’t told him who I’m sending [the documents] to at this stage,” he said.
Read more here:
Krishani Dhanji
That’s it from me today. Thanks for following along on a busy sitting week!
I’ll leave you with the wonderful Adeshola Ore. Have a great weekend (I’ll be having a sleep-in).
No threat to Australia after 7.4 magnitude quake in the Philippines: BoM
The Bureau of Meteorology says there is no threat to Australia after a 7.4 magnitude quake in the Philippines.
The quake struck the Mindanao region on Friday, triggering a tsunami warning.
Reuters reports Indonesia has issued its own tsunami warning for the North Sulawesi and Papua regions.
You can follow live updates on our blog here:
Daisy Dumas
NSW announces $145m first all-electric bus depot for Macquarie Park
Sydney’s first purpose-built all-electric bus depot is to be built in Macquarie Park and will service 150 buses running on routes across the city’s north.
The depot, due to open by 2028, is part of the state’s conversion of 8,000 buses to zero-emission technology.
The transport minister, John Graham, said the announcement of the $145m depot, jointly funded by federal and state governments, was a “big moment” in the rollout.
“This first all-electric depot really is a big step forward,” he told reporters this morning. “It’s really unprecedented to be building an all-electric [depot].”
Jerome Laxale, the federal member for Bennelong, said it was a “great day” and that the project, including its $115m commonwealth contribution, had been “easy to fight for”.
In September, Brookvale became the first of Sydney’s 11 bus depots to be converted. Leichhardt and Kingsgrove are expected to be fitted with electric chargers by 2026.
The ACT and Victoria have electric bus depots, while Western Australia is building its first fully electric site. South Australia is installing electric chargers at its Morphettville depot.
Coalition’s immigration spokesperson takes veiled dig at Hastie in speech calling for debate ‘based on facts and evidence’
The Coalition’s immigration spokesperson has taken a thinly veiled swipe at Andrew Hastie in a speech to the Migration Institute of Australia this afternoon.
Paul Scarr, a moderate, has promised a more empathetic and measured approach to migration when coming into the role, and says debate on the issue must be “based on evidence and facts”.
Hastie has recently made public comments about “mass migration” – a term Scarr has rejected – and said migration levels have made Australians feel like “strangers” in their own country.
In his speech, Scarr said:
The debate with respect to Australia’s immigration policy must be had. It is an important debate. But the debate must be based on evidence and facts. It must be measured and considered. It must not seek to inflame emotion, but rather to engage in good faith.
The shadow immigration minister also didn’t hold back on his criticism of the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, accusing him of vacating the space and neglecting to have a nuanced debate.
He said when Burke recently revealed Australia’s permanent migration intake for this year, he did so in a three-sentence statement, which was “simply not good enough”.
When making proposals, it is simply not good enough to provide a number without explaining how you derived that number. You need to be clear on proposed policy settings and linking them to how you are going to achieve outcomes. You need to be able to answer detailed questions about numbers for different visa categories. If you do not do that, you lose credibility …
It is especially not good enough in the context of Australia going through one of the most tumultuous periods of discussion of immigration policy in recent times. Transparency is important … Otherwise, the vacuum is left to be filled by the extreme fringe elements.
Allegra Spender quits parliamentary sports club after Pocock ban
Independent MP Allegra Spender has quit the parliamentary sports club and called Senator David Pocock’s ban an “absolute disgrace”.
Spender has also been pushing the government to act on gambling reform and to respond to the late Peta Murphy’s landmark parliamentary review, which was handed to Labor more than two years ago.
In a statement, Spender wrote:
What an absolute disgrace that former Wallaby, Senator David Pocock has been excluded … because he raised concerns about the club’s links to the gambling industry.
The sports club should be about politicians’ love of sport, not their sad addiction to the gambling lobby.
Fellow independent Monique Ryan also quit after it was first revealed the gambling lobby was sponsoring the club.
Cait Kelly
Following from the last post …
Asked later how many people’s payments had been illegally cancelled, the deputy secretary of DEWR, Tania Rishniw, said:
We’re working through those numbers. As I said earlier, each cancellation or reduction under the legislation that’s been [cancelled] or suspended was paused for a different reason. The total number of people impacted, we’re still working through.
While cancellations were paused, the department said there had been 321,995 payment suspensions for 205,870 job seekers between May and July this year.
Cait Kelly
Government investigating after more than 300,000 Jobseeker payments illegally cancelled over four years
Yesterday the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) was asked about the legality of the TCF, the system that operates mutual obligations.
Analysis from Economic Justice Australia shows more than 300,000 income support payments were illegally cancelled between 2020 and 2024.
The secretary of DEWR, Natalie James, said the system “was not always operating as intended”.
She said the government was looking into whether providers were making illegal decisions over suspensions and cancellations.
There are thousands of decisions being made in any week under these provisions. And so humans are not perfect, and obviously, as we’ve found out, nor are our systems.
There are times where the providers aren’t exercising the judgments we would prefer.
Before anything gets into a system, a provider, an employee and a provider is making a judgment about whether certain requirements have been met.
Payment cancellations are now on hold while the government works out how to operate the system legally.
